Nipah virus outbreak: What are monoclonal antibodies?

Subject : Science and tech

Section :Health

Context:

India reached out to Australia to procure monoclonal antibody doses to combat the Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala.

What is a monoclonal antibody?

Niels K. Jerne, Georges J.F. Köhler and César Milstein were awarded the medicine Nobel Prize in 1984 for their work on “the principle for production of monoclonal antibodies”.
Monoclonal antibodies are laboratory-made proteins that mimic the behavior of antibodies produced by the immune system to protect against diseases and foreign substances.
- An antibody attaches itself to an antigen – a foreign substance, usually a disease-causing molecule – and helps the immune system eliminate it from the body.
Monoclonal antibodies are specifically designed to target certain antigens.

What is m102.4?

m102.4 is a “potent, fully human” monoclonal antibody that neutralizes Hendra and Nipah viruses, both outside and inside of living organisms.
- Glycoproteins are one of the major components of viruses that cause diseases in humans. The m102.4 monoclonal antibody binds itself to the immunodominant receptor-binding glycoprotein of the Nipah virus, potentially neutralizing it.
m102.4 is developed by Dr. Christopher Broder and his team at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) in Bethesda, Maryland, with help from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Currently, the drug is used on a ‘compassionate use’ basis– a treatment option that allows the use of an unauthorized medicine under strict conditions among people where no other alternative and/or satisfactory authorized treatment is known to be possible and where patients cannot enter clinical trials for various reasons.

How do monoclonal antibodies work?

They are meant to attach themselves to the specific disease-causing antigen. An antigen is most likely to be a protein.
Hybridoma is a fusion cell made up of B cells (white blood cells that produce antibodies) and myeloma cells (abnormal plasma cells). These hybrid cells allowed the researchers to produce a single antibody clone, which came to be known as a monoclonal antibody.
These antibodies are made using recombinant DNA technology.
The gene that codes for the monoclonal antibody’s binding region — also known as the variable region — is isolated from a B cell or synthesised in the laboratory. This antibody is then introduced into a host cell, often a bacterium or a mammalian cell, using recombinant DNA technology. The host cells, called bioreactors, produce large quantities of the monoclonal antibodies which are extracted, purified, and readied for use as desired.

Hendra and Nipah virus:

Both Hendra and Nipah viruses are bat-borne Paramyxoviridae – a family of viruses that contain a single-strand RNA of negative-sense genome, similar to the ones that cause diseases like measles, influenza etc., and replicate within infected cells.
Both Hendra virus and Nipah virus are on the World Health Organisation’s list of priority diseases requiring urgent attention for research and development of therapeutics.

Source: TH